


Without Her

by Rhys (Tathrin)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Multi, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-12 07:12:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tathrin/pseuds/Rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SPOILERS for FotJ Allies! After Jaina breaks off her engagement with Jag, he and Zekk have a long chat about duty, love, Jaina, the Force, and bug-hugging.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladielazarus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladielazarus/gifts).



Jagged Fel sat alone in the darkness in the hollow, echoing chamber of his room in Coruscant’s Imperial Suite. In his hand he clutched a ring. The gem cut into the flesh of his palm but the pain he fought was a deeper ache. Jaina was gone and he was alone. He had, once again, done his duty and it had lost him her forever. He knew it was forever this time; her eyes had held no hesitation when she left, only sorrow and farewell. He knew well the signs of dutiful sacrifice, did Jagged Fel, and he knew that this time she would not come back from what she had to do—not back to him, at least. It felt like he was, again, spiraling down in flames but this time there were no trees below to catch his fall nor the chance of a quick, clean death when the earth came up to dash his broken ship. This time he was just falling forever into the empty nothing that was life without Jaina. He pictured the future and it was cold, and gray, and orderly, and he was all alone.

The door behind him slid open with a soft hiss of pressurized air but Jag did not turn around. He wished to see no one and had given clear orders not to be disturbed for anything less than a true emergency. This intrusion meant that either his Empire was crumbling around him or another assassin had come for him. Jagged could not find it within himself to care much either way. His Empire had cost him Jaina, and the bleak loneliness of a future without her gave him little impetus to fight for himself. He knew that it wasn’t Jaina walking back through that door, would never be Jaina, and so whatever had entered his room, Jagged Fel did not care.

“Jag?”

For half a heartbeat the familiar sound caught Jag’s breath in his throat but then his senses came to and vaped his started hopes before he’d had time to more than blink. That was Jaina’s tone, but not her voice. It was the other one, who spoke sometimes in Jaina’s words and with Jaina’s thoughts, but was no Jaina. It was Zekk, the ever-present Jedi Joiner who was never far enough away from Jaina’s mind for Jagged’s comfort.

For a moment the Imperial Chief of State wondered how Zekk had gotten in here undetected through all the levels of security meant to guarantee him his solitude, but while Zekk was annoying he was—regrettably—hardly an incompetent and Jaina had proved often enough that no amount of guards or locks or harried, hapless aides could keep a determined Jedi from walking through whatever doors she chose to in the Imperial Suites.

Jag allowed himself a heavy sigh of annoyance before he spoke. “What do you want?” he asked, the words coming out even more harshly than he had intended.

“To see if you’re all right.” Something clicked along the wall as if Zekk was looking for the switch for the glowpanels.

“Leave it off,” Jag growled.

“All right.” There was the muffled sound of boots on carpet and the door slid closed again behind the intruder. The freakishly tall Jedi moved closer but Jagged didn’t bother to turn around to look at him. He’d seen more than enough of Zekk for a lifetime and the last sight he wanted now was the long-haired Jedi wearing sympathy on his face or worse, _pity_.

“What are you talking ab—she told you,” Jagged interrupted himself. “Of _course_ she told you,” he muttered. He should have known. Obviously Jaina would have already told Zekk all about it. The Wookiee-sized Jedi had probably known what was coming before Jagged himself found out. Then a more important thought made it through the haze of grief that shrouded Jag’s thoughts and he did turn to stare at the intruder while a chill laced around his heart. If Zekk was here…had he come to gloat? To stake his claim? To see if this was really the end for Jag and Jaina, if his chance had come at last? Both Jedi maintained that there was no lingering romance between the two of them, but Jag had never been able to really believe that. And now that Jaina had seen that the Empire would always stand between the two of _them_ , had she returned her heart to the safety of the Jedi Order? To the hands of her longtime partner and childhood love? Was _that_ why Zekk was here?

Anger broke through the empty grief for a bright, white-hot moment and Jag decided that yes, he _did_ enough have energy to go for his blaster after all.

But Zekk spoke again before he could move and there was no gloating in his voice, no triumph. “She didn’t tell me,” Zekk said. “I felt it happen.”

That made it worse. Jag had convinced himself that he could live with the creepy bond his beloved had with her former flame, but despite strident protestations to the contrary he had never been comfortable with it. He was hardly comfortable with the Force at all, even now, but their bug-bond had always disturbed him more than any other Jedi trait or trick though he tried hard not to let Jaina know. She probably had anyway, but he tried, and she had let him keep the lie. But this…this was too much.

“Then shouldn’t you be with her right now?” Jagged asked bitterly, sinking lower in the chair. He had learned, for the first time, the point of a slouch: it was misery.

“She’s gone,” Zekk replied. “She left planet almost immediately after leaving…here.”

 _You_. Jag could tell, he had been about to say, _leaving you_. He swallowed hard against a sudden lump in his throat. Somehow Zekk saying it—or almost saying it—made it real in a way that it hadn’t been before. Jaina was _gone_. Forever.

“And why didn’t you go with her?” Jag asked, scowling into the darkness in front of him although his glare was directed at both Zekk and at his own childishness in asking the question.

“She didn’t want me along,” Zekk replied as matter-of-factly as if they had spoken on the comm instead of just sensing it through their freaky mental bug-bond. “She needed time alone.”

“Right,” muttered Jag. He’d wanted solitude, too. But now _Zekk_ was here, like salt dumped over a wound. Or possibly acid. “So why are you _here?_ ” he asked again.

“I told you, to see if you were all right.”

Only Jag’s Chiss upbringing kept his voice level. “Well I’m fine,” he said, “so you can leave again. _Please_.” The last word was an order, not a request.

Zekk just snorted. “You are _not_ fine; you are sitting here in the dark wallowing in sorrow. I could feel the heartbreak from the hallway twelve floors down. You’re _not_ fine, of _course_ you’re not. How could you possibly be fine?”

“Don’t act like you can read what I’m feeling, Jedi,” Jagged growled.

“Jag,” said Zekk, his voice soft, “you think _I_ don’t know what it feels like to lose Jaina?”

There was nothing Jagged Fel could say to that. “What do you _want?_ ” he asked, the anger gone again beneath the smothering weight of grief.

There was suddenly an impossibly tall Jedi towering at his side and a firm hand on his shoulder. Jag grimaced but didn’t have the energy to pull away. “I was worried about you, moron,” Zekk said. “Jaina’s heartbreak practically knocked me over from halfway around the planet, and I can’t imagine you took this any better than she did. In fact, I’d bet you took it worse, because I’m pretty sure it was her idea. It felt that way, anyway…”

“It was,” Jag said curtly. He didn’t want to discuss what had happened, least of all with _him_ , and he certainly didn’t want to discuss what Zekk had felt Jaina feeling.

“Well, then I imagine it pretty much tore your heart out and left you bleeding fetal on the floor.”

Jag said nothing. The Jedi was right and there was no sense trying to argue the point, but there were parsecs between not arguing something and admitting to it, and Jagged couldn’t bring himself to do the latter.

Zekk replied to the silence with a reassuring squeeze of his shoulder. Jag resisted the urge to punch him. “Why are you _here?_ ” he asked again, his voice heavy ice.

Somehow he could feel Zekk roll his eyes, or maybe he was just projecting what he knew would have been Jaina's reaction onto the taller Jedi. Zekk himself was almost impossible for Jagged to get a read on, but half the time he just seemed like an oversized version of Jaina and then Jag felt like he knew Zekk all too well.

“To see _you_ ,” Zekk said in a voice that made it pretty clear that he thought Jagged was acting mentally deficient. “I knew you’d be in as much pain as she is, and I figured you’d probably be alone.”

“So you came here?” Jag demanded. “Why?” _To gloat?_ he did not add.

“Because you’re in pain, you idiot, and we care about you.”

“ _We_ ,” Jag snapped with a grimace. He did recoil this time, shoving Zekk’s hand away. Jagged glared darkly up at the freakishly tall Jedi despite the painfully awkward angel he had to turn his neck at to do so.

Zekk definitely rolled his eyes this time. “Yes, _we_ ,” he said.

“ _You_ most certainly do not,” Jag retorted. He shifted to sit upright. He couldn’t fight this conversation at anything less than proper military posture. Besides, his spine was starting to protest the slouch with vehemence. “ _Jaina_ does,” he corrected harshly—he couldn’t bring himself to say _cared_ , to say _did_ , to acknowledge the past tense they were in now. “You, for whatever sick, insectoid reason, are just leeching off her emotions to bother me, or use it as an excuse to come and gloat perhaps.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” said Zekk calmly. “They aren’t _her_ emotions, they’re _ours_. Yes, she felt them first, but it doesn’t matter with whom the feeling originated, we both feel it. So yes, _we_ care, and _I_ care, whether I like it or not.”

Jagged Fel wondered how much trouble he would actually get into if he shot a Jedi Knight in his private quarters. He knew his people could scrub the security tapes and make the corpse disappear, and if Jaina wasn’t ever coming back he didn’t have to worry about seeing recrimination in her eyes when he lied. And it wasn’t as if slotting a Jedi would do the Empire’s reputation any serious harm if the news somehow leaked. But there was that bug-bong thing to consider. Would Jaina know about it if he vaped the tall freak?

Zekk shrugged. “I know it’s weird,” he admitted with a grin that was almost sheepish. “And yes, it used to really bother me—both of us—sometimes, but we’re over that now. You can’t just refuse your own emotions, whether they originated with you or with someone else. Once you feel them, they’re yours. So yes, _we_ care.”

Jagged’s frown deepened with the clear intention of setting up permanent residence on his forehead. “You’re insane,” he said tiredly.

The Jedi shrugged again. “Well, we used to think we were bugs, so…I’d say we’re getting better.” Then he sobered and looked down at Jag searchingly. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? I don’t mean just now, it always has.”

Jag squirmed in his seat then gave in to the urge to rise and started pacing. Zekk was used to the constant blur of motion that was Jaina, after all; the Jedi wasn’t likely to even notice Jagged’s parade-straight fidgeting, let alone comment on it. And he couldn’t stay in the chair with Zekk looming over him like some terrifically annoying talking tree.

“It doesn’t matter,” Jag said. It didn’t matter, not if Jaina was gone. And she wasn’t ever coming back so it wouldn’t ever matter again.

“Jag, she really loved you,” Zekk said quietly. Jagged Fel looked away. He didn’t want to see pity in Zekk’s eyes. He really would have to kill him then. “I mean she _really loved you_ ,” Zekk continued. “Leaving broke her heart like nothing else. Trust me, she _didn’t_ want to.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jagged flatly. “Duty comes first.”

“What happened?” Zekk asked quietly.

“She left,” Jag said curtly. He stopped, facing away from Zekk, and clasped his hands behind his back. He stared at the darkness in front of him that was usually dotted with the star-like lights of Coruscant. He’d blanked the window; he didn’t want that tonight. He’d wanted to be alone, but instead he was saddled with an inquisitive, annoyingly sympathetic Jedi bug. “She asked me to do something for her and I wouldn’t,” Jag elaborated tonelessly, “so she left.”

There was silence for a long moment. “Something you couldn’t do because of the Empire?” Zekk asked.

“Yes,” said Jag.

“And she left because of that?”

“She needed help and I couldn’t give it to her,” Jag said. _You would have, if she’d asked you_ , he didn’t say. He was pretty sure Zekk had never refused Jaina anything in their lives. Why had he said no to her? Would it have been so bad to give in, just that once? More than once, even; that would have started the cycle of always giving in, always doing what he shouldn’t because she asked him, but would that have been so bad, really? The small, selfish voice that Jag had acquired since his exile—the voice that did not understand duty, and did not talk in Diplospeak—told him that he should have, but Jag was Fel, and he ignored it.

Almost.

“But…she _knew_ you wouldn’t always be able to,” Zekk protested. “I mean, you both have duties that…”

“Conflicted,” Jag said shortly. “Our duties conflicted.”

“That doesn’t mean your lives had to,” said Zekk softly. He took a few steps forward but didn’t come close enough to intrude on Jag’s suspended pacing.

Jag blinked at the darkness. He felt the slow beginnings of surprise crawling into his thoughts. Was _Zekk_ arguing for Jaina _not_ to leave? Or had Jagged perhaps ingested glitterstim by mistake and was now hallucinating? He shook his head. “Of course they did,” he said bitterly. “We should have seen that in the beginning.”

Zekk frowned. “You two are both impossible,” he said crossly. “Just because you can’t _work_ together doesn’t mean you can’t _be_ together.”

Jag looked back up at the tall Jedi, wondering if he really _was_ insane. “I do _not_ understand,” he admitted at last.

When Zekk’s green gaze met Jagged’s, the Jedi’s face was serious enough to do a Chiss admiral proud. “She _loves_ you, Jagged Fel,” he said. “She always will. Trust me; she loves you so much that _I_ almost fell for you.” Jag twitched but couldn’t manage to pull his gaze away from the Jedi’s. Some cheap Force trick, no doubt. He grimaced. Zekk continued, seemingly unaware of Jagged’s attempts to free himself; his voice was kind but laced with exasperation. “And there’s enough heartbreak and loss in this room that I can tell you _clearly_ love her every bit as much,” he said. “Now, maybe it’s because my sense of _military_ duty is second-hand via Jaina, and the Jedi Order is all about following twisty paths as the Force wills, but personally, _I_ don’t see why the two of you couldn’t just agree to disagree and leave all that at the office—so to speak—and ignore that crap based on the fact that you are so incredibly in love.”

Jagged wrested his gaze free with a scowl. “Well, it’s too late for that now, either way,” he said harshly. “And I don’t see why you care, anyway. Shouldn’t you be happy about all this?”

Zekk made the exact same sort of exasperated sigh that Jaina was so prone to. He must have rolled his eyes as well; she always did when she made that sound. Jag fought the urge to glance back and check. He didn’t want to get trapped again. “You’re _not_ getting it,” Zekk said. “First of all, Jaina and I? That’s over. That was over a long time ago, we just didn’t realize it. It would _never_ have worked, not after the Joiner thing. We became _too_ close, and it would have just been weird. We figured that out a while ago and I don’t know how you missed the revelation because you were around when it happened.” 

Jag stalked back to his chair, ignoring the ridiculously tall Jedi. He dropped into it in a manner that he would have described as petulant if he’d caught anyone else doing so. He wanted out of this conversation. It was just poking at the wound, and his heartbreak was far too fresh for that. Zekk might claim that he had come here out of concern, but so far all he’d done was make the pain worse. If that had been his plan, it was being executed flawlessly enough to satisfy Jagged’s father.                      




“Secondly,” he Jedi continued doggedly, “there’s no _way_ I could be happy about _anything_ with Jaina in that much pain, even if I were in fact enough of an ass to revel in your misery, which I am not. Even if I would prefer to be able to. But I can’t, because I unfortunately care about you. Besides, when I said that Jaina’s heartbreak was almost strong enough to knock me over, I meant that literally. The only reason I’m not curled up in a little ball of weepiness right now it that she’s off planet.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Jag muttered.

“All right, maybe that’s a bit of hyperbole, but not that much. It was pretty staggering.” Zekk grimaced. “I’m just glad that I was unconscious when she caught up with Jacen at the end,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “I can’t even imagine how brutal that must have been for her.”

The Jedi was silent for a long moment and Jag slowly turned around to look up at the incredibly tall figure through narrowed eyes.

“What?” said Zekk.

Jag fought the words but they came out anyway, slow and reluctant and inexorable. “How close did you _used_ to be, then?” he asked. He’d never pressed Jaina for those sorts of details because he hadn’t wanted to know. He didn’t want to know now, either; especially not now, when it really didn’t matter anymore but…he has asked anyway.

“Umm…we were a _we_ ,” Zekk replied. “Pretty much literally. It was actually sort of confusing. Well, I mean, not at the time. At the time, _everything_ made sense. UnuThul and all that…” Zekk winced, and seemed to decide that perhaps going into all of _that_ with Jagged Fel, Chiss exile, was a bad idea. He’d been there, after all. “But afterwards, when Master Skywalker had helped untangle us a little and we were apart enough to be two people again—or to tell that we were, anyway, even if we didn’t always _think_ like two people—that’s when it got confusing. I mean, imagine that you’re in love with someone, but you _are_ that someone, and she’s in love with someone else whom _you’ve_ never met, but if _she’s_ in love with him, then _you’re_ in love with him, because you _are_ her, even though you’re in love with…yeah.” Zekk shook his head. “Insane doesn’t really begin to cover it. And very annoying, too, and it used to freak us out on occasion—again, not so much at the _time_ , but thinking about it later…” He shrugged. “But we’re over that now.”

Jagged stared at him as if the Jedi had been speaking in tongues that even the Empire’s finest protocol droids couldn’t have translated. “You’re over that,” he echoed at last.

“Well, you can either freak out all the time about whose feelings belong to whom and what are they doing in your head and which head is yours anyway…or you can get on with your life.” Zekk shrugged again. “There’ve been weirder things.”

Jag’s eyebrows arched up towards his close-cropped hairline. “Really,” he said.

“All right, so the Joiner experience is pretty high on the list,” Zekk admitted. “But it doesn’t _seem_ as weird as it _sounds_. It’s only when we try to explain it to someone who wasn’t, you know, bugified, that it comes out badly. In our heads, it just made sense— _still_ makes sense. It’s just how we _are_. Sometimes we’re us, and sometimes we’re _we_.”

Jag couldn’t repress a shudder. He didn’t like thinking about things like that, about thinking someone else’s thoughts and never being able to trust your own and…he grimaced. He couldn’t begin to fathom how Jaina dealt with that. The Force was weird enough under normal circumstances, but _nothing_ about _that_ was even close to normal. Not even by Jedi standards, which Jagged had come to realize were _far_ more lax regarding normallacy than anything the Chiss were capable of even conceiving.

“And _that_ ,” Zekk finished, “is why I’m _here_. Because we care about you, and seeing you in so much pain is breaking our heart.”

The scowl returned to Jag’s face with twice the intensity that it had borne before. “ _Jaina_ ,” he said through gritted teeth, “isn’t _here_. She _left_ , that’s the whole _point_.”

Zekk nodded. “And it’s killing her. Especially given how much it’s killing you. She didn’t want to put you through that.”

 _What did she think would happen?_ Jag didn’t ask. Instead he growled, “Jaina isn’t even in _system_. Stop pretending like you can speak for what she feels.”

“I can, though,” Zekk said gently. He glided back over and Jag crossed his arms and looked away. “It’s what I feel, and what she feels, and what _we_ feel: your being in pain breaks our heart.”

“Stop saying that!” Jag snapped.

Zekk dropped to a crouch in front of Jagged and Fel would never have admitted it but it was a relief not to have to crane his neck at unnatural angles to look up at the impossibly tall Jedi Knight. “We’re so sorry,” Zekk said softly.

Jag closed his eyes and fought hard against the liquid brewing beneath his lids. He would not weep. Not in front of _him_ ; not ever.

A warm hand closed around his forearm. “We do care, Jagged,” said Jaina’s voice out of the darkness. “I’m sorry.”

Jag opened his eyes and in front of him it was Zekk but in the Jedi’s green eyes he could see Jaina looking out at him above a soft, sad smile. Gentle hands on his cheeks tilted his head up and Zekk leaned forward and this time Jag did not pull away. He closed his eyes and sank into the kiss and Zekk tasted a little like Jaina and a little like farewell.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally just a little joke that I wrote for a friend when she was going to be home alone and bored. But I have this problem where I'm incredibly verbose, so it sort of got out of hand. And actually I guess it kind of worked, at least according to her; I don't know, it made me giggle when I wrote it, but she liked it as an actual story, so she wanted me to post it, even though this really isn't my sort of thing, stories like this...with the mushy stuff...but if you do like the mushy stuff, hopefully you liked this one, I guess?


End file.
